The Moberly Lady Saints took advantage of Ozark Christian College’s depleted lineup of having just six players in uniform Tuesday by playing some tenacious high-pressure defense, and would cruise to an 81-39 blowout victory at home.

Last night’s win against the team from Joplin improved Central Christian College of the Bible women’s basketball record to 5-7 for the season, and 2-0 in Midwest Christian College Conference play.

Next up on the Moberly CCCB Lady Saints agenda is a Saturday home date against Grace University of Omaha, Nebraska at 2 p.m.

“I expect some bigger changes for us in the second semester because we now have 11 players avaliable while in the first semester we were playing games with only about six or seven girls. With 11 players we are deep enough to play pressure defense and we have the availability to rotate players in and out more readily,” said CCCB women’s coach DéRonté Polite.”Our full court man-to-man defense caused Ozark to turn the ball over quite a bit in that first half and we made some easy baskets out of it.”

Moberly CCCB led 52-13 at the break, and the second half opened with an 11-0 run.

Sophomore Kelsi Mueller of Eldon knocked down a pair of 3s during that stretch, while senior Taylor Terry of Stroh, Ind. would end up having a 4-point play.

“With them being short-handed, we wore them down a bit. In the second half we wanted to slow the game down and work on our half court offense. We wanted to be patient by not taking the first shot that became available and instead rotate the ball around until there was a solid, better shot to take,” said coach Polite, whose team finished with 21 assists and steals in the game.

CCCB women also shot 44 percent from the field making 33 of 74 shots.

“The lead that we had from the first half allowed us to be more patient with the ball and more selective in our shooting, and that was a good thing for us to work on.”

Sophomore Ciara Allen led four Lady Saints in double figures with 16 points scored. She also had four steals and four assists.

Also scoring was freshman Tianna Terry with eight, freshman Jackie David of Moberly and Terry’s senior sister Taylor both scored seven points. Nikki Halderman had six and Alyssa Huffman added three points for the cause.

CCCB women made 9 of 12 free throws and Ozark Christian went 9-for-10 at the stripe.

Page 2 of 2 - Leading scorer for Ozark (0-13, 0-3 MCCC) was senior Sarah Rhodes with a game-high 28 points, and Janie Weece had six